


Paranoid

by deadinderry



Category: Guns N' Roses
Genre: because where would we be as a community without so many internal monologues, there is nothing here but me playing with stevens pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-15
Updated: 2019-10-15
Packaged: 2020-12-16 22:44:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21044027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deadinderry/pseuds/deadinderry
Summary: So he's paranoid, right, because he loves them and he just wants to make sure that they love him, too.





	Paranoid

**Author's Note:**

> bc when i read his memoir he uh, he was always paranoid about his friends suddenly hating him bc let's be real here, boy definitely had some mental health issues he stacked addiction on top of

The first time Steven Adler was absolutely convinced that his best friend hated him, he was fourteen. He didn’t really remember what he’d done (fourteen was, for Steven Adler, a really fucking weird year, with a lot of things he’d _rather not remember, actually, _and a lot of pot, and a lot of days that were exactly the same), but he did know that he’d seen Saul, Saul was one of his best friends in the fucking world, he’d gone up, Saul had just brushed past him like he wasn’t there.

So he went and got high because if he didn’t he would fucking _spiral_, and then he happened to see Saul again, and he offered him a hit, because pot will fix everything if you just give it a chance, and it did work its magic that day.

“Are you mad at me?” Steven asked.

Saul looked at him, frowning. “What?”

“You just like—are you mad at me?”

“No,” Saul said.

“Oh,” Steven said. “Okay.”

.

The second time Steven Adler was absolutely convinced his best friend_s _(moving up the world, see?) hated him he was twenty-one. The band was doing pretty good at this point; him and Slash and Duff were always out partying and stuff like that. He loved Izzy, too, Izzy was the absolute _coolest_, he just liked having time to himself and doing his own thing, and he guessed he loved Axl too even if he was a total fucking asshole a lot of the time, but the triad, the _boys_, that was Steven-Slash-Duff. Slash was the same as he’d always been. Duff was fucking great—tall and handsome and punk as fuck. And also, Steven was pretty sure, kept him alive a lot of the time.

And he didn’t know why it had gotten into his head, right, that they hated him this time around. It was just a feeling he was getting. And he wasn’t fourteen anymore, and he wasn’t high enough to just out-and-out ask them if they hated him, so he was just sort of stewing in it. It was a morning after kind of time, and he was the only one up, because he didn’t really sleep all that much. He wasn’t tired or anything, he just didn’t, you know, need it—last to bed and first to get up, on a normal day, pretty much. He was pretty hungry so he’d scrounged up some change and gone down to the closest gas station and bought a couple of doughnuts.

Duff stumbled out while he was halfway through his second, took it out of his hand, took a bite of it, and scrunched up his nose. “What the fuck is this?”

“A doughnut,” Steven said.

“What the fuck is _in _it? That’s not normal jelly. That is not a normal jelly doughnut.”

Duff did sit down and eat the rest of it, though. All bleary-eyed with a lot of eyeliner still smeared around his face from the night before. It was pretty unfair that Duff looked so fucking cool even right after waking up. All of them did, really. It was a little baffling how cool and good-looking they were all of the time. Steven was used to feeling out-classed in the looks department, being best friends with Slash for years, but it was honestly unfair. And Duff was even _tall_.

But they were good guys. He loved them.

He just hoped that they loved him, too.

“Where’d you get this?”

“Gas station down the street,” Steven said. He nabbed another one. He’d pretty much just showed the guy behind the counter how much cash he had and asked him how many he could get, and the guy had said five, but also if he came back at like two in the morning (it was a twenty-four-hour place) he could get the day-befores, so Steven was planning on that. “I like it there. The guy behind the counter was nice.”

“Yeah?” Duff said. He grabbed another one. “Shitty doughnuts, though.”

“He said he’d give me the day-befores if I show up at the right time,” Steven said. “So this is the last time we’re getting fresh ones.”

“Great,” Duff said. But he grinned, a little, and shook his head, and kicked Steven’s ankle.

It might seem dumb, but that kick sort of brought him out of it. Of _course _Duff didn’t hate him. Duff didn’t hate anyone, hardly, and plus, Duff was one of his best friends. And he was probably being stupid about Slash, too.

.

There were other times. Little times where he’d panic deep in his chest and everything would turn out fine. It got to the point where he just started telling that voice to, uh, _shut the fuck up _whenever it popped up, and maybe that’s why he was blindsided when it was actually true.


End file.
